Available thesis topics

Problem Statement

Usable security for virtual and augmented reality systems (VR/AR) is an area that is relatively underexplored. This thesis aims to investigate the feasibility of authentication mechanisms for VR/AR, while considering the usability and security aspects, specifically potential attacks.

Tasks

• Get familiar with VR/AR hardware and software
• Get familiar with authentication techniques
• Find and study related literature
• Develop\reuse software tracking the body motion and model it in VR
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Preferred (but not necessary) qualification

• Knowledge in the area of human computer interaction
• Independent thinking and creative problem solving
• Experience in programming with Unity a plus

Details

Problem Statement

Our homes are currently equipped with ubiquitous computing services, be it our smart phones, smart TVs, Alex, or lifelogging devices. The availability of these devices offers novel opportunities for user authentication, as well as raises privacy concerns and potential novel security attacks. This thesis, aims to explore the raised opportunities and challenges from the availability of smart devices in our daily vicinity.

Tasks

• Get familiar with VR/AR hardware and software
• Get familiar with authentication techniques
• Find and study related literature
• Develop / reuse software tracking the body motion and model it in VR
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Preferred (but not necessary) qualification

• Knowledge in the area of human computer interaction
• Independent thinking and creative problem solving
• Experience in programming with Unity a plus

Details

Students interested in topics related to usable security and privacy have the opportunity to do their master theses / bachelor theses / practical research project (Einzelpraktikum) at the Research Institute CODE (Bundeswehr University Munich). More information on the research group on Usable Security and Privacy Group can be found on our website.

We offer a large variety of topics, including but not limited to:

• Tangible Security/Privacy Mechanisms (Ansprechpartner: Sarah Delgado)
• Human Behavior and Physiological Responses in Security Critical Situations (Ansprechpartner: Felix Dietz)
• Behavioral Biometrics (Ansprechpartner: Lukas Mecke)
• Usable Security in Smart Homes (Ansprechpartner: Dr. Yomna Abdelrahman)
• Novel Security Mechanisms based on Gaze (Ansprechpartner: Yasmeen Abdrabou)
• Novel Blockchain User Interfaces (Ansprechpartner: Michael Froehlich)
• Physiologicacl Security (Ansprechpartner: Mariam Hassib)
• Social Engineering
• Virtual Reality as Research Methodology (Ansprechpartner: Rivu Radiah)

A list of current topics is available on our website.

If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch with the respective contact person.

Details

Description

Shoulder surfing refers to situations where a person observes another person's private interactions with technology (e.g., private messages on a smartphone, or personal identification numbers on ATMs). In this thesis, we will investigate how VR can be used as a platform to study shoulder surfing. In this context, we will explore the effect of audio feedback on behavior in VR, covering both the attacker and the victim.

The objective of this thesis is to obtain a thorough understanding of how audio feedback in Virtual Reality affects human behaviour in the context of shoulder surfing. The student is required to review previous work on shoulder surfing and particularly its prior applications in VR. The thesis requires the design and implementation of a user study in VR.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Review of relevant research questions in the application area
• Developing and setting up a virtual study environment
• Running a user study in VR
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Good programming skills
• Nice to have: experience with 3D modeling and development with Unity

Details

Problem Statement

The act of manually analyzing images and other data representations is an important step in many detection tasks. For example, detecting cancer cells in medical imagery. This step can consume a lot of time and requires expert knowledge in the respective field. The images are large and have to be looked at piece by piece to identify the important sections. Machine learning (ML) techniques like outlier detection and classification can help guide the experts to the interesting parts. Despite their impressive performance improvement in the last decade, it remains a challenge to use the workflow of automating ML models in fields that require a high level of accountability, such as medicine or environmental sciences. In such cases, it is common to integrate human input to correct model imperfections, allowing experts to trust the system more easily whilst increasing overall productivity. In this thesis, a human computation system will be designed with the purpose of leveraging both ML models and crowdsourcing. The design choices will be focused on 1) how to make a user interface that helps citizens vote correctly on images, 2) how to aggregate model output and citizen output, and 3) how to use the aggregation results to guide the expert for using the visualization interface.

Tasks

• Perform a literature review
• Familiarize yourself with developing visualization tools (previous experience on information visualization is appreciated)
• Implement an interactive website for the experts
• Implement object detection algorithms in order to identify oil spills, using satellite synthetic aperture (SAR) radar images
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write a thesis and present your findings in the Disputationsseminar
• (Optional:) co-write a research paper

References

• A novel deep learning method for marine oil spill detection from satellite synthetic aperture radar imagery
• Rapid Assisted Visual Search

Details

Problem Statement

Research has shown that student feedback is very helpful in improving teachers' performance in class. As visualization tools are one of the most popular ways of expressing data and aiding humans in taking better decisions, this thesis aims to help improve teaching quality and help teachers with visualization tools necessary for improving their performance.

Tasks

• Perform a literature review
• Familiarize yourself with developing visualization tools (previous experience on information visualization is appreciated)
• Implement an interactive website for the teachers
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write a thesis and present your findings in the Disputationsseminar
• (Optional:) co-write a research paper

References

• Student Ratings of Teaching Quality Dimensions: Empirical Findings and Future Directions
• The Power of Feedback

Details

In this Master Thesis you will develop novel solutions to make use of unstructured UI tree data yielded form Android Smartphones. Such data could be used in future adaptive systems to learn what the user is aiming for, to make more accurate and concrete predictions. Please check the PDF announcement on my webspace: Master Thesis: Deep Activity Tracking on Android Smartphones
23.02.2022

Details

Description

Electrodermal activity (EDA) denotes the measurement of continuous changes in the electrical conductance properties of the skin in response to sweat secretion by the sweat glands. EDA is autonomously modulated by sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity, a component of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is involved in the control of involuntary bodily functions as well as cognitive and emotional states. Specifically, phasic EDA activity correlated with stress, cognitive load, and attention orienting. Therefore, measuring phasic EDA responses can give us information about the user's state.In this thesis project, we want to develop an adaptive system that modifies the visual complexity of the VR environment based on changes in phasic EDA. Specifically, we want to use new signal processing methodologies termed adaptive thresholding and gaussian filtering.The research consists of three main stages: (1) validation of the psychophysiological inference underpinning the adaptive system (2) implementation of a working VR prototype, and (3) an evaluation of the adaptive environment.

You will

• Perform a literature review
• Modify an existing VR environment
• Implement an preprocessing pipeline for phasic EDA detection
• Collect and analyze electroencephalographic (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and electrocardiography (ECG) data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need

• Strong communication skills in English
• Good knowledge of Unity
• Good knowledge of Python libraries for scientific computing (e.g. Scipy, MNE).

References

• Fairclough, S. H. (2009). Fundamentals of physiological computing. Interacting with computers, 21(1-2), 133-145.
• Chiossi, F., Welsch, R., Villa, S., Chuang, L., & Mayer, S. (2022). Virtual Reality Adaptation Using Electrodermal Activity to Support the User Experience. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 6(2), 55.
• Babaei, E., Tag, B., Dingler, T., & Velloso, E. (2021, May). A critique of electrodermal activity practices at chi. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
• Kleckner, I., Wormwood, J. B., Jones, R. M., Siegel, E., Culakova, E., Heathers, J., ... & Goodwin, M. (2021). Adaptive thresholding increases ability to detect changes in rate of skin conductance responses to psychologically arousing stimuli.

Details

Description

Mixed reality (MR) systems refer to the entire broad spectrum that ranges from physical to virtual reality (VR). It includes instances that overlay virtual content on physical information, i.e., Augmented Reality (AR), and those that rely on physical content to increase the realism of virtual environments, i.e., Augmented Virtuality (AV). Such instances tend to be pre-defined for the blend of physical and virtual content. To what extent can MR systems rely on physiological inputs to infer user state and expectations and, in doing, adapt their visualization in response? Measurement sensors for eye and body motion, autonomic arousal (e.g., respiration, electrodermaland heart activity), and cortical activity (e.g., EEG, fNIRS) are widely used in psychological and neuroscience research to infer hidden user states, such as stress, overt/covert attention, working memory load, etc.However, it is unclear if such inferences can serve as useful real-time inputs in controlling the presentation parameters of MR environments.In this thesis project, we will investigate whether this blend can be adaptive to user states, which are inferred from physiological measurements derived from gaze behavior, peripheral physiology (e.g.., electrodermal activity (EDA); electrocardiography (ECG)), and cortical activity (i.e.., electroencephalography (EEG)). In other words, we will investigate the viability and usefulness of MR use scenarios that vary in their blend of virtual and physicalcontent according to user physiology. In particular, we will focus on understanding how physiological readings can passively determine the appropriate amount ofvisual information to present within an MR system.

You will

• Perform a literature review
• Modify an MR environment
• Adapt existing processing pipeline for EEG and EDA data
• Collect and analyze electroencephalographic (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and electrocardiography (ECG) data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need

• Strong communication skills in English
• Good knowledge of Unity
• Good knowledge of Python libraries for scientific computing (e.g. Scipy, Neurokit)

References

• Lotte, F., Faller, J., Guger, C., Renard, Y., Pfurtscheller, G., Lecuyer, A., & Leeb, R. (2012). Combining BCI with virtual reality: towards new applications and improved BCI. In Towards practical brain-computer interfaces (pp. 197-220). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
• McGill, M., Boland, D., Murray-Smith, R., & Brewster, S. (2015, April). A dose of reality: Overcoming usability challenges in vr head-mounted displays. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2143-2152).
• Fairclough, S. H. (2009). Fundamentals of physiological computing. Interacting with computers, 21(1-2), 133-145.

Details

Description

Biocybernetic adaptation is a form of physiological computing where real-time physiological data from the brain and the body can be used as an input to adapt the user interface. In this way, from the physiological data, we can infer the user’s state and design implicit interactions in VR to change the scene to support certain goals. This thesis aims the develop and evaluate an adaptive VR environment designed to maximize users' performance by exploiting changes in real-time electroencephalography (EEG) to adjust the level of visual complexity. The research consists of three main stages: (1) validation of the input EEG measures underpinning the loop; (2) implementation of a working VR prototype; and (3) an evaluation of the adaptive environment. Specifically, we aim to demonstrate the sensitivity of EEG power in the (frontal) theta and (parietal) alpha bands to adapt levels of visual complexity.

You will

• Perform a literature review
• Modify an existing VR environment
• Implement an online biocybernetic loop using EEG
• Collect and analyze EEG, EDA, and ECG data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need

• Strong communication skills in English
• Good knowledge of Unity and/or C#
• Good knowledge of Python libraries for scientific computing (e.g. Scipy, MNE).

References

• Biocybernetics Loops and Physiological Computing
• Development of an Adaptive Game using EEG frequencies

Details

Description

Research from cognitive science and computerized displays of simple stimuli has shown how perceptual load is a critical factor for modulating distraction. Perceptual load is the amount of information involved in processing task stimuli. According to Lavie (1995), our attentional resources are limited and mainly directed towards task-relevant goals, but we might be more prone to distractors if we have cognitive spare resources. Previous research showed that human faces have bigger distracting power than non-face objects. This project aims to assess the distracting potential distracting effect of human avatars in a social VR scenario. We aim to transfer of traditional paradigms that assess attention and distraction to immersive VR. Lastly, we adapt the target-distractor recognizability to evaluate if a physiologically-adaptive system that optimizes for perceptual load can support task performance. The research consists of three main stages: (1) validation of the psychophysiological inference underpinning the physiological loop (2) implementation of a working VR prototype, and (3) an evaluation of the adaptive environment.

You will

• Perform a literature review
• Modify an existing VR environment
• Implement an online biocybernetic loop using EEG and/or EDA
• Collect and analyze electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and electrocardiography (ECG) data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need

• Strong communication skills in English
• Good knowledge of Unity and/or C#
• Good knowledge of Python libraries for scientific computing (e.g. Scipy, Neurokit, MNE).

References

• Perceptual Load of faces
• Perceptual load and task engagement
• Evaluating perceptual load in VR

Details

Description

Physiological computing is a multidisciplinary research field in HCI wherein the interaction depends on measuring and responding to the user's physiological activity in real-time (Fairclough, 2009). Physiological computing allows for implicit interaction; by monitoring the physiological signals of the user, the computer can infer, e.g., if the task demands are either too challenging or easy, and either adapt the difficulty level or when users are getting distracted from the task, the system could give them a notification. Measuring the psychological state of the user creates intriguing possibilities for Social VR scenarios as we can either adapt the number of displayed avatars, their form or even their proxemic distance. This thesis aims the develop an adaptive Social VR environment designed to support users' performance when engaged in a cognitive task using a measure of physiological state (electrodermal activity: EDA) as input for adaptation. The research consists of three main stages: (1) validation of the psychophysiological inference underpinning the physiological loop (2) implementation of a working VR prototype, and (3) an evaluation of the adaptive environment.

You will

• Perform a literature review
• Modify an existing VR environment
• Implement an online biocybernetic loop using EDA
• Collect and analyze EEG, electrodermal activity (EDA) and electrocardiography (ECG) data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need

• Strong communication skills in English
• Good knowledge of Unity
• Good knowledge of Python libraries for scientific computing (e.g. Scipy, Neurokit).

References

• Biocybernetics Loops and Physiological Computing
• Adapting task complexity of a Social VR environment based on skin conductance

Details

Imagine Bob's office is connected via a (quantum-)encrypted connection to a server. How could Bob access this server from his home office if he does not have the necessary hardware at home? Well, he could get keys in his office and save them on his personal key-safe token. He could subsequently use the token at home and connect to the server.

The topic of offline distribution of cryptographic keys is interesting for researchers and practitioners alike, even outside the QKD context. Hence, exemplary open questions include: Which use cases for offline key distribution exist? How could the key-safe token look like (design, usability and security)? Is there a possibility to detect unauthorized access to the token?

Details

Description

This projects purpose is to investigate in building a full body tracking system based on self-made trackers which are usable by the HTC VIVE and its Lighthouses. We want to compare the original HTC VIVE tracker with a varying amount of self-made trackers in order to use it for VR sport analysis.

Tasks

• Building a set of at least 10 tracker based on the enclosed literature
• Implementation of an application for testing purposes
• Compare the existing Tracker with the self-made tracker in terms of usability for VR sport analysis

Preferred qualification

• Experience in hardware and software prototyping
• Experience in C# programming for Unity 3D
• Interest in performing experiments
• Interest in performance enhancement in sports

Suggested Reading

• The HiveTrackers will serve as the foundation for the self-made trackers Tracker foundations
• This project can help to create suitable sensors Sensor foundations

Details

Gaze-based head gestures are a hands-free interaction technique using the occulo-vestibular reflex. A bachelor thesis showed already that this interaction technique works for checking checkboxes and answering dialogs.
This thesis should research whether advanced interaction, such as drag & drop operations, using scrollbars and manipulation of 3D objects, is possible with gaze-based head gestures.

Tasks

• Get familiar with hardware and software
• Find and study related literature
• Develop software supporting the interaction method
• Design a user study
• Conduct a user study
• Do a statistical evaluation
• Write all down in a thesis

Details

We want to explore user experiences of social media content turned into location-based and distributed AR. This means that you prepare an AR interface that presents social media content in different ways and aggregated forms.

Tasks:

• AR Programming
• Mobile Application Programming
• Field Study
• Review and test your prototype.

Requirements:

• Basic knowledge about AR and mobile app programming.

Suggested Reading:

• Chidambaram et al. "rocessAR: An Augmented Reality-Based Tool to Create in-Situ Procedural 2D/3D AR Instructions." 2021.
• Babajide Osatuyi "Information sharing on social media sites."2013.
• Wang et al. "DistanciAR: Authoring Site-Specific Augmented Reality Experiences for Remote Environments." 2021.

Details

VR offers the possibility to create own realities independent from the physical reality. Immersed in VR, users can explore and interact with their virtual surroundings. In this work, you will explore how to comprehensibly display user triggered changes, movement patterns and interactions in a shared spatial VR across time and space. It will be your task to implement different layers of information for a VR scene before developing a menu in which users can alter the displayed information linked to prior users‘ activities. You will deal with the time and scalability dimensions of such traces and explore the duration of displaying such information as well as the tracking time.

Tasks:

• Implement different information layers of traces of prior user interactions.
• Create an interaction menu in VR that allows users to alter prior user's interaction visualization.
• Test your system and concept in a user study.

Requirements:

• Experience in either VR programming (Unity), C# or 3D modeling.
• Basic knowledge of user research.

Suggested Reading:

• Vichitvejpaisal et al. "Relive History: VR time travel at the world heritage site." 2019.
• Landeck et al. "Metachron: A framework for time perception research in VR." 2020.
• Stoev et al. "Exploring the past: a toolset for visualization of historical events in virtual environments."2001.

Details

Description

Development of a method in virtual reality to measure user behavior or user states (occupant monitoring) in the automotive domain.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Define the concept
• Develop and implement your concept
• Conduct a user study to test and verify your concept
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Able to organize and perform user studies and experiments
• Interest and experience in Software Development
• Interest in Psychology
• Experience with programming based on practical projects
• Bonus: Experience with Unreal Engine
• Bonus: Experience with Virtual Reality Development

Contact

Email: klingner ät fortiss.org

Details

Description

Car accidents are a significant concern, as they claim a high number of yearly fatalities. These accidents have been accounted to originate from recognition errors, including driver's inattention, internal and external distraction, and inadequate surveillance, causing decision errors. These errors can be attributed to a lack of situation awareness.Thus the development of a tool to measure people's situation awareness in VR could be very beneficial. It could be used to assess the user's situation awareness and compare different scenarios and interfaces and their respective effects.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Define the concept
• Develop and implement your concept
• Conduct a user study to test and verify your concept
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Able to organize and perform user studies and experiments
• Interest and experience in Software Development
• Interest in Psychology
• Experience with programming based on practical projects
• Bonus: Experience with Unreal Engine
• Bonus: Experience with Virtual Reality Development

Contact

Email: klingner ät fortiss.org

Details

Description

Smoking lead to long-term health issues, causes death and big costs in the economy and health system. Many people would like to stop smoking, but many attempts stay unsuccessful. That is why new ways of treating nicotine addiction are being sought. Virtual Reality (VR) has developed rapidly with many important technical advancements that is becoming more widely available and user-friendly. This opens new therapy possibilities.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Define the concept
• Develop and implement your concept
• Conduct a user study to test and verify your concept
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Able to organize and perform user studies and experiments
• Interest and experience in Software Development
• Interest in Psychology
• Experience with programming based on practical projects
• Bonus: Experience with Unreal Engine
• Bonus: Experience with Virtual Reality Development

Contact

Email: klingner ät fortiss.org

Details

Description

In this thesis project, we will investigate how an AI-system learns characteristics about the user through interaction patterns and user reactions. The final goal is a system in a specific domain, that adapts to the user based on their characteristics.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work in the research area of user profiling, interaction design and related psychology topics
• Find (based on an interesting usecase) one user characteristic, which is possible to detect based on interaction patterns or user reactions
• Develop and implement your concept
• Conduct a user study to test and verify your concept
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Able to organize and perform user studies and experiments
• Interest and experience in Software Development
• Interest in Psychology
• Experience with programming based on practical projects

Contact

Email: klingner ät fortiss.org

Details

Inhalte

Das bayerische Landesforschungsinstitut fortiss und IBM werden im Rahmen des IBM fortiss Center forAI das Thema Stress-Management für sicherheitskritische Anwendungen erforschen. Dafuür wird einKonzept entwickelt, um Stress bei Einsatzkräften der Feuerwehr zu überwachen und managen. Die Ideen werden prototypisch umgesetzt und präsentiert. Die Workshops und Gespräche während desPraktika können entweder in englischer oder deutscher Sprache gehalten werden.

Bewerbung

Beschreiben Sie kurz Ihre Motivation, relevante Fachkenntnisse, beispielsweise aus früheren Kursen,Jobs und anderen Projekten, die Ihre Fähigkeiten in einem oder mehreren der folgenden Bereichedemonstrieren: Programmierung, Benutzererfahrung, Nutzerstudien, Prototyping.
Senden Sie es anyuanting.liu ät fortiss.org

Details

After an initial induction into existing marker technologies and conducive 3D printed objects, the goal is to design and build new a machine learning (ML) pipeline to detect conductive markers. Therefore the prototyping of physical markers is required, these will be used to record capacitive tangible footprints using the screen of a large capacitive screen as ML ground truth data. Based on that a model will be trained to distinguish and classify capacitive markers on touchscreens using a new ML classifier.

You will:

• Perform a literature review
• Building capactive marker
• Recoridng data for the training
• Train a ML model using TensorFlow
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and presenting them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in english
• Good knowledge of data processing
• Good knowledge of machine learning

References

• Super-Resolution Capacitive Touchscreens
• 3D Hand Pose Estimation on Conventional Capacitive Touchscreens Submission

Details

The goal of this work is to get an overview of the vast variety of selection methods in smart environments, mixed reality, and VR. Through a literature review, the first step is to select a handful of selected methods. Therefore, in the next step, these interactions need to be implemented, to allow them to be compared in a lab study. Here, the aim is to compare these technologies with respect to measurements such as accuracy, speed, immersion, presence, and their effect on the embodiment.

You will:

• Perform a literature review
• Investigate different selection methods for VR focusing on e.g., controller vs. controller less, absolute vs. relative, feedback vs. no feedback
• Implement the study application
• Conduct the user study
• Study data analyse and propose design guidelines
• Record video up to 5min long explaining the thesis
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and presenting them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in english
• Knowledge of human tracking techqniues (e.g., OptiTrack)
• Good knowledge of running studies
• Good knowledge of implementation most likely using Unity

References

• The Effect of Offset Correction and Cursor on Mid-Air Pointing in Real and Virtual Environments
• Modeling Distant Pointing for Compensating Systematic Displacements
• Up to the Finger Tip: The Effect of Avatars on Mid-Air Pointing Accuracy in Virtual Reality
• EyePointing: A Gaze-Based Selection Technique
• Improving Humans’ Ability to Interpret Deictic Gestures in Virtual Reality

Details

This project aims to build a push-to-talk (PTT) system on top of the WebRTC API. PTT is a communication technique that allows the user to talk to others through a microphone only when the user presses a button (or similar). The project will start with a literature study to determine how PTT can be implemented on top of WebRTC. After that, the focus will be on implementing a PTT system.

You will:

• Perform a literature review
• Implement a PTT system
• Conduct and evaluate a user study
• Design different interfaces for web and mobile
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in english and german
• Good knowledge of web development (react & react native)
• (Optional) General knowledge of the WebRTC API and audio-codecs

References

• [Documentation] WebRTC
• [Documentation] mediasoup
• [Paper] Evaluating two approaches for browser-based real-time multimedia communication
• [Paper] Service diffusion strategies for push to talk over cellular

Details

This project aims to use the ad hoc network functionality of iPhones to build a mesh network (especially if the provider network is down) within a manageable area). A mesh network is a network where each device can act as a router for other devices. This allows for a network that is very robust against failures of individual devices. The project will start with a literature study to find out how to build such a network. After that, the focus will be on the implementation of the network.

You will:

• Perform a literature review
• Implement a mesh network
• Conduct and evaluate experiments
• Design a user interface
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and presenting them to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in english and german
• Good knowledge of iOS development (Swift) =
• Good knowledge of networking

References

• [Pitch] Wireless Mesh Networking App
• [Video] Build device-to-device interactions with Network Framework
• [Sample Code] Building a custom peer-to-peer protocol

Details

With the increasing proliferation of augmented reality glasses (e.g. Hololens), we are getting closer to the vision of truly mobile interaction in a digitally augmented physical world. As a consequence, a major part of the interaction with such devices will happen on the go. This establishes a need for interaction and visualization techniques that support the user in highly mobile situations. In this thesis, we will prototype and evaluate such interaction and visualization techniques to better support users while interacting on the go.

Tasks:

• Development of interaction concepts
• Prototypical implementation
• Design and conduct a user study

Requirements:

• Good programming skills (C#, Unity is a plus)

Details

Mixed reality describes a continuum between physical reality and complete digitality (i.e., virtual reality). Both, reality and digitality, offer inherent advantages and disadvantages depending on the use case. For example, a higher degree of digitality causes a loss of connection to the real world and, on the other hand, a higher degree of reality decreases the immersiveness of the experience.In this thesis, we will investigate how the positive and negative factors of reality and digitality affect different usage scenarios. Furthermore, we want to investigate how users can move on this continuum, i.e., how they can control the amount of digitality and reality.

Tasks:

• Development of interaction concepts
• Prototypical implementation
• Design and conduct a user study

Requirements:

• Good programming skills (C#, Unity is a plus)

Details

Description

Virtual Reality is increasingly being used as a research tool. It is particularly useful in situations, where users should not be put at risk, for example, when testing a novel automotive user interface; or where running a study in the real world is a lot of effort.

At the same time, affective user interfaces, that respond to or evoke certain emotions are becoming increasingly popular. However, it is unclear yet how well emotion elicitation works for different tasks commonly done in virtual reality.

The objective of this thesis is to obtain a thorough understanding the lasting effects of emotions in humans during performing tasks in VR. We look into different tasks in VR, different emotion elicitation methods and how long the emotions last. The thesis requires the design and implementation of a user study to understand how task performance is affected due to emotions in VR. In addition, this work also explores how negative mood elicitation affects task performance.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Design and development of a prototype
• Evaluation of the prototype and comparison to previous work

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Experience with C# 3D authoring tools (e.g.,Unity) is preferred

Details

Details

Group behavior visualization in virtual communication.
Details

Spatial behavior as non-verbal channel in virtual communication.
For detailed information have a look at » my website
Details